Hessy Taft recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial in Israel with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby
photograph on the front cover, and told the story of how she
became an unlikely poster child for the Third Reich.
When Hessy Taft was six months old, she was a poster
child for the Nazis. Her photograph was chosen as the
image of the ideal Aryan baby, and distributed in party
propaganda. But what the Nazis didn't know was that their
perfect baby was really Jewish.
“I can laugh about it now,” the 80-year-old Professor Taft
told Germany’s Bild newspaper in an interview. “But if the
Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn't be alive.”
Prof Taft recently presented the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial in Israel with a Nazi magazine featuring her baby
photograph on the front cover, and told the story of how she
became an unlikely poster child for the Third Reich.
Her parents, Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, both talented
singers, moved to Berlin from Latvia to pursue careers in
classical music in 1928, only to find themselves caught
up in the Nazis’ rise to power. Her father lost his job at an
opera company because he was Jewish, and had to find
work as a door-to-door salesman.
In 1935, with the city rife with anti-Semitic attacks, Pauline
Levinsons took her six-month-old daughter Hessy to a
well-known Berlin photographer to have her baby photograph
taken.
A few months later, she was horrified to find her daughter’s
picture on the front cover of Sonne ins Hause, a major Nazi
family magazine. Terrified, the family would be exposed as
Jews, she rushed to the photographer, Hans Ballin. He told
her he knew the family was Jewish, and had deliberately
submitted the photograph to a contest to find the most
beautiful Aryan baby.
“I wanted to make the Nazis ridiculous,” the photographer
told her. He succeeded: the picture won the contest, and
was believed to have been chosen personally by the Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
Frightened she would be recognized on the streets and
questions asked about her identity, Prof. Taft’s parents
kept her at home. Her photograph appeared on widely
available Nazi postcards, where she was rrecognized
by an aunt in distant Memel, now part of Lithuania. But
the Nazis never discovered Prof. Taft’s true identity. In
1938, her father was arrested by the Gestapo on a trumped
up tax charge, but released when his accountant, a Nazi
party member, came to his defense.
After that, the family fled Germany. They moved first to
Latvia, before settling in Paris only for the city to fall to the
Nazis. With the help of the French resistance, they
escaped again, this time to Cuba, and in 1949 the
family moved to the United States.
Today the Jewish woman who was once a Nazi poster
child is a professor of chemistry in New York.
“I feel a little revenge,” she said of presenting her
photograph to Yad Vashem. “Something like satisfaction.”
